links + recs

...for the dog days

Hey, have I mentioned that I wrote a book? I splashed that fact all over the internet last week, and have been a little overwhelmed by your response and encouragement. I signed a publishing contract with Tehom Center Publishing, which is a non-traditional press. Marketing will be mostly my own responsibility, and while I have a bunch of very fun ideas for spreading the word about All Tyrants Are Boring between now and May 4 (pub day!), your comments, emails and invitations have made me re-think what’s possible. Like: y’all asked me to come to your cities on my book tour! I wasn’t planning on mounting a BOOK TOUR, but…now I kind of am? There are a lot of logistics and expenses involved in something like that, and logistics and expenses are two of my least favorite problems to solve, but now I’m noodling around with the idea of a Summer 2027 Tyrants Tour. Summer 2027 Boring Tour?

My brain has been airing out over the last week or so since I finished writing that book and did all the publishing contract things. There’s room in there, again! I’m not trapped in the worlds of biblical tyrants and sentence structure anymore, and I’ve been noticing other things. Reading other things. Having thoughts about OTHER THINGS. Here are a few OTHER THINGS that have caught my liberated attention, lately:

I’ve been reading BOOKS! Devouring them, really. Three standouts:

1. Emilee Hackney’s “All That’s Unseen” was a beautiful Appalachian memoir. She writes about my mountains and the people here in the way they should be written about: honestly, lovingly, with open-eyed devotion that doesn’t skip over the problems but also doesn’t blame the victims for them.

I borrowed a friend’s copy, but here it is on the shelf at A New Chapter bookstore in Lewisburg, WV.

2. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion has been a booktok phenomenon for a little while, but I found it because the bookstore owner at A New Chapter bookstore in Lewisburg, WV pressed it into my hands and demanded I read it. She was absolutely correct. There are 9 installments published now, and my biggest problem is finding the next one at the library.

3. I KNOW that Ann Patchett is an expert, a wizard, a top-notch novel writer whose work will never disappoint, but I still resisted reading her latest, Whistler, for some unknown reason. Then I ordered the monthly bundle of Annie B. Jones’ favorites from The Bookshelf in Thomasville, GA, and a beautiful hardcopy arrived in my mailbox. It’s gorgeous. So good.

Finished reading at The Bibliopub here in Roanoke, glad to have a latte to chase the end-of-book FEELS.

Here are a few things I read on the internet that I appreciated:

Everybody got all aflutter about the Atlantic’s cover story on the end of reading, which I read and quoted for a good several days. But I deeply appreciated Anne Helen Petersen’s corrective about context. It’s not that we don’t want to read; it’s that our lives make it difficult to do it.

I love Kevin Kruse’s writing. This one, on the history of immigration and who counts as “white” in this country was particularly helpful.

If you, like me, have been actively avoiding the ongoing horrors of living in an authoritarian state at the end of empire, it’s probably good to take your head out of the sand for a few minutes and assess just how bad things have gotten. A few articles documenting extrajudicial kidnappings, local police collusion and law enforcement overreach should do the trick.

I visited Rising Silo Brewery in Blacksburg for the first time last week and was super impressed.

This roundup of cool internet things people built before ceding the world to AI slop is very encouraging.

Can someone do a deep dive into why women’s underwear is produced, marketed and sold so differently than men’s? And why Ex-Officio is so much better than anything else?

Do you have tomatoes from your garden right now? Or from your neighbor’s garden? The farmer’s market? Quick: MAKE A BLT with homemade pesto-mayo, on fresh baked sourdough. You won’t regret it.

pair it with a Cheerwine if you’re so inclined.

I spent two Saturdays in a row hiking to waterfalls. Highly recommend.

What are you recommending these days? I’m all ears.